We see this a lot as a design and Development firm. A client comes in and says, “I love what you did for Client A, and I want you to do the same for me!” The thing that they never seem to mention is how their budget is around $500 to $1000 dollars and the site you built Client A took you almost 2 months of work to complete. So that $1000 of money wont even get you past the log-in script let alone the entire site build. While this really doesn’t sound like a huge issue, in fact it creates a lot of “what if” time for developers where we are earning nothing and booking nothing as well.

For instance. If we receive 10 requests for proposals (RFP) in a week without an idea of budget, that means we must spend an hour or more on each RFP in order to build a quote without knowing if that person can even afford the service they want from us. We are then forced to tell other potential clients to wait because we wont be sure which clients will pan out once we hand back those RFP as quotes to the client. So the question is, what is a company supposed to do? If you’re spending 10+ hours a week on the RFP alone, how can you weed through the clients that are better suited for out of the box low budget scripts? I’m turning to the readers out there for some help.

As a second question, why is it that most clients assume web development in general is cheap? Since when did spending months on a project become something that should cost $500? Especially when that developer is living right here in the US and is available for direct conference calls daily. Has the overseas market diluted our industry to the point that clients assume the least cost first? Discuss…